If you have missed the first part of this sessrep where Black Spy, Alhambra, Archipelago, Haba Jungle Treasure and Artifact were played, you can read about it here. This report talks about the WILDCATTERS session, a game of oil tycoons in the 19th century.

WILDCATTERS

One of the games that Kaz had mentioned a few times while we were in Essen last year was WILDCATTERS, a relatively low-profile game from Rass Games based in Netherlands. It took awhile for us to locate their booth but when he found them, Kaz inexplicably didn’t pick up a copy of the game then!

Anyhow after many twists & turns in his sleep back in KL, Kaz finally succumbed and pulled the trigger to ship a copy from Rass Games. Guess he liked his with “shipping charges”.

WILDCATTERS are produced in limited print run – 900 copies only with its own unique signed certificate. Kaz’s copy was #601 so looks like they’ve less than 300 copies to go before this goes OOP.

And OTK has the privilege of getting the first play in January this year. Here’s the sessrep of our session.

WILDCATTERS plays to four (well, most of last year’s Essen crops play to 4 only) and we’ve Ivan and Wong YL taking up the other two seats. Kaz going thru the game rules. It must be closed to 2 am when we started our Round 2 session with this game.

You are oil baron (wanna-bes) in the 19th century with some money but good access to potential oil fields, and you’ll be investing in – or paying to use – oil rigs, refinery and transportation (both land and sea) to build up your oil empire! The game plays over a map of the world and oil fields are found in four continents – North & South America, North & South Asia (areas denoted with some light colors).

There are 3 continents without any shade of color (white) – Europe, Africa and Australia – with no oil fields. They can still be supplied with oil but would not be part of the oil producing nations.

Each player starts with his own set of oil industry assets – oil rigs, pumpjacks, refinery, trains, tankers – 20 shares in his own starting company and some money ($10). I was the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (green).

Above: A player chart summarizing the turn order sequence and all the player actions you can perform.

The game is played over 7 rounds (for 4p) and each player gets to do one set of actions (A-H, above) in each round. Pretty straightforward turn sequence.

Above: Turn order marker to indicate number of rounds left to play. For 4p, you play to 7 rounds while a 3p session gets one additional round. There’s an intermediate scoring round after round 5.

Setting up your Base

Everyone starts the game with 7 assets – drilling rigs (3), refinery (1), oil tanker (1) and trains (2). Each of us get to select one of the four oil field areas (North & South America or Noth & South Asia) to start our oil domination by dropping an oil refinery into our selected area. Each area only supports one oil refinery at the start, so this means all players’ base are dispersed in the beginning of the game.

Next we took turns to place our oil rigs, trains and tanker.

You don’t get to place your assets “anywhere” on the map as you wished to. There’s a certain restriction as to where you may choose to place your remaining 6 assets; and that’s determined by the 8 area cards dealt to you. You have to place your asset in an area designated by one of the cards in your hand.

Above: South America refinery was claimed by Blue (Wong YL) and he has also built two train networks (used for transporting oil to the refinery/harbour). Naturally Blue has also invested in two drilling rigs. Green (me) shared the same optimistic outlook for South America and has built one train network and also two drilling rigs.

Yellow (Ivan) on the other hand decided to go it alone at Texas. Interestingly, Green has parked his tanker next to the Yellow refinery. I actually can’t remember why I did that! Maybe I have an area card that allowed me to drop an asset into NA.

While America was taken by Blue (south) and Yellow (north), Green (me) and Red (kaz) decided to invest into Asia, with Green going south to Persia while Red went north to the Dutch.

The Business of Oil

Your path to riches is rather straightforward… you decide where to invest in oil rigs (hoping to strike oil!) and once you struck oil, you build pumpjacks to start producing crude oil which you’ll then need to transport to an oil refinery. The obvious transportation mode would be by trains but you can also transport the crude oil on tankers across the ocean to other oil refinery (for eg if you prefer to sell your oil to another market).

While everyone has all the above assets – oil rigs, pumpjacks, refinery, trains, tanker – to form your own self-contained supply chain, it’s not likely to be the most effective approach. You’ll often need to leverage on your competitor’s infrastructure in order to maximize your gains. For eg if you wish to send some of your crude oil from a South America rig to an Asian refinery, you might be better off sending it on a competitor’s tanker if he’s already heading to Asia.

Above: Shares are the main “cashflow” in this game

When you use other people’s assets, you would obviously expect to have to pay for the services. In Wildcatters, you pay using shares – and not money. This is an interesting – and key – aspect of the game; exchange of shares thru the procurement of services and purchase of oil among the players with one of the major VP (victory point) objectives to be either the 1st or 2nd majority in each company (not unlike ACQUIRE).

Money is related to secondary cashflow. You do need money when building infrastructures and performing certain actions like drilling for oil, transporting oil etc but there’s no money income engine to build in this game. Everyone gets $10 on your turn and given the limited turn you have, it’s crucial you have a plan on how you intend to use the limited funds you’ll be getting.

The License to Riches

Similar to the initial setup of your oil assets – where you can only build them based on the area cards in your hand – in each round, you need to obtain a “license” (ie area card) in order to perform any action (be it drilling for oil, transporting oil or building new assets) on that area.

There are always 8 area cards for you to choose from and sometimes the area you wished to act on may not appear in the 8 cards presented to you. You can either 1) spent 4 VPs to refresh another set of 8 cards, or 2) be adaptable in your plan.

The area card also provides a one-time bonus (depicted at the bottom of the card) which can be either money, VP or shares. You wouldn’t normally choose an area for its bonus but it does help to sweeten the deal.

Picking the above area card would mean you are only allowed to build assets and perform actions in the southern part of North America (the shaded area). You also gain two bonus; the first is the bonus of $1 and the 2nd is the (one-time) ability to force one refinery to unload (sell) all the barrels ie “emptying the refinery” – see the section “Money is made only when you sell” later in this report.

The area cards are flushed if there are 4 or more cards from the same area drawn. This does help to ensure you do get a good set of options from the 8 cards. You usually would. In our session, I think I always felt I’d some flexibility in choosing which area I wish to develop though I suspect your mileage may vary depending on how well diversified your assets are.

If you want to strike oil, dig more holes

These were early days of the oil industry, where Earth hasn’t be pumped dry of oil and it was relatively easy to discover oil. All you need is to have more drilling rigs and your party would soon strike oil! You actually need 4 drilling rigs in an area to strike oil. The four rigs can come from any player – so there’s a small cooperative element in play here.

You can of course chose to build all four rigs yourself but that would cost you a total of $18 and since you get only $10 per round, it’ll take up two rounds of your income. Then there’s still the tankers, refinery etc to build? No, it would be better – and more expedient – if others are also involved in your little oil gig.

Above: Green leading the consortium of 3 green oil rigs + 1 red oil rigs to strike oil in the eastern side of South America. Once oil is found, each of the oil rig owners can convert their drilling rigs into pumpjacks (which produce 3 barrels of crude oil ready to be send to the refinery). The lead player (ie the one who chose to take the Drilling for Oil action which costs $8) would get to convert one oil rig to a pumpjack for free (complete with 3 barrels).

The other players in the consortium can choose to profit from this action (remember this action is not in the other player’s active turn) and pay the active player 3 shares in their own color to convert one of their oil rigs into pumpjack as well. This is one way how you can acquire shares in other player’s color.

The active player can also choose to convert the rest of his drilling rigs (in the same area) into pumpjacks at the cost of $3/rig. Pumpjacks are not nice-to-have assets, they are must-have investment as without them, you produce no oil at all.

What are Wildcatters?

“Wildcatters” are independent people who set up drilling rigs in areas not known to be oil fields (yet). They are sometimes employed as “scouts” by oil companies to prospect for crude oils in unexplored areas, or most times they are opportunists hoping to get onto the tail of an oil strike.

When oil is successful found in any of the oil field areas, there’ll be an opportunity to acquire any wildcatters in the same area (since with the successful find, oil companies will be moving into production phase and the wildcatters normally move on to other new unexplored areas).

The Wildcatters tokens (above) are auctioned off only to players who have active oil rigs in that area… the winning player gets to produce a barrel of crude oil on the Wildcatters rig and there’s also an end-game bonus VP for players who have acquired certain number of Wildcatters tokens.

The number of Wildcatters tokens are set up in the initial stage, with more Wildcatters tokens in oil field areas that have less drilling rigs.

Crude is worthless unless you can process them

Once you have your crude oil machinery purring from those pumpjacks, you’ll want to be able to send those barrels to either the nearest refinery or an oversea refinery of your choice. You might wonder why would it matter which refinery you send your crude barrels to, and if sending overseas cost more, what’s the benefit to you? Let me hold this question first. I’ll come back to it when I talk about selling the crudes.

Transpoting oil – like drilling – is also a cooperative action; with the active player choosing the Transporting Oil action (and paying $4). Only the active player needs to pay the $4 cost, the other players who have pumpjacks in the same area may transport their oil (without having to pay the $4).

Oil is transported thru three stages

– from pumpjacks to a harbour

– from the harbour to local refinery or tanker

– from refinery (when processed) to the end-user market (one of the 7 continents)

The barrels are never sent direct to an oil refinery. It’ll always get transported to a harbour first (and would need to use one or more train network) and from the harbour to either the local oil refinery or into a tanker for further transport to an overseas oil refinery. Whenever you use a train or tanker of another player, you’ll need to pay for the services by paying one share of your own color.

Above: Crude oil barrels were transported from the pumpjacks (two green, one red and one wildcatters belonging to red) thru the blue train network into the harbour. Green and Red would have to pay Blue two shares in green and red respectively. Not bad investment for Blue in the train network. He gained 4 shares for the $2 investment – and possibly more shares as Green & Red would have to continue using the Blue train network unless they build one of their own train network.

From the harbour, each player (active player goes first then in turn order) would transport to the oil refinery. The owner of the oil refinery (Blue in the above example) would then have to pay to the owner of the barrel one share in his own color (ie blue) for the “purchase” of each barrel. When Blue gets to “empty” his refinery (ie sell the barrels to the market), he’ll gain back shares (as sale revenue) – four shares of any color per barrel sold.

Note: It’s also possible to transport from the harbour to another oil refinery (not local but within the continent or even across continent). Asia / Africa would be a good example as their land mass is huge.

One can always make use of the services of the oil tankers that berthed themselves next to harbours. You usually find this “opportunitist” tankers parking where there’s plenty of oil action going on. They are just waiting to ship your barrels away (for a fee of course)!

These tankers can be useful in helping you send your oil barrels to faraway refinery markets for eg the four tankers off the South America harbour (above) could send the SA crude oil to the Africa continent – or in fact any continent. This flexibility (to be able to sell your crude oil to any refinery) is an integral aspect of the game which you would understand as you delve deeper into the game’s layers.

You do pay the usual service fee of one share in your own color for each oil barrel loaded to the tanker.

In some harbours where there’s no oil refinery built yet – example above in East Asia – oil tankers are the only way you may be able to get your crude oil barrels sent to some faraway oil refinery to be processed. Else your crude remains as crude and you won’t be profiteering from your initial investment in the oil rigs & pumpjacks. That’s not how oil tycoons make their moolah. 😛

Money is made only when you sell

It’s exciting to have struck oil! And great feeling as your pumpjacks fill up those barrels. You do make some money (2 shares per barrel) when you send your crude oil to someone’s oil refinery. But real money (and VP) is made when your oil barrels get refined and sold to the end market.

There are 7 markets (or continents) where your refined oil would eventually be sold to. The owner of the oil refinery in that market (continent) controls the sale of these barrels. If you are not the owner, then at best you can only sell your crude oil to the refinery and get paid in shares (of the owner’s color; 2 shares per barrel). The owner – after his refinery processed your crude oil – would be able to -re-sell the refined oil to his local market at 4 shares (of any color) per barrel. That’s a healthy margin and offers good flexibility in helping him manage his shares mix in the fight for first & second majority in each company (for the VP scoring at mid- and end-game).

If you are the owner of the refinery, then you get to choose whether you want to have shares or VP when selling your own refined oil to the local market (thru refinery). If you need cashflow (or rather share-flow), you can supply your refined oil to the continent for 4 shares of your choice but the oil barrels are sent back to the stock pile (and not added to the continent pool therefore you won’t be competing for the Area Majority).

Or you can choose to supply your refined oil to the continent for the (possible) Area Majority bonus VP scoring but you won’t get any share in return for your sale.

You might think you’ll miss out if you are only supplying the oil refinery with your crudes (just getting 2 shares for your barrel) but there’s also an Area Majority scoring at the end of the game, where the players who supplied each continent (market) with the most and second-most number of barrels get bonus VPs. This scoring happens at both the mid- and end-game phase therefore the bonus VPs for supplying oil to a continent is equally as important as selling refined oil for the Shareholding bonus VP.

An oil refinery only gets to “empty” itself (ie sell the refined oil to its local market) when it’s filled with 5 barrels of crude oil. As in the example above, the yellow refinery in NA still needs two more barrels of crude oil to arrive before it can empty it’s refinery to the NA market.

That’s about it for an overview of the game. The game covered almost the full supply chain of setting up oil rigs, striking oil, getting them to a refinery, processing them and then selling them to the local market (continent). It didn’t deal with the retailing of the refined oil to the consumers but that’s probably too downstream for the scope of this game.

Share Movement

The most interesting aspect of this game is the share movement; how shares are used as a “currency” when the players interact with each other. The game has money but the money is used only when you are investing in your own oil assets and to perform certain action (eg drilling and exchanging oil rigs to pumpjacks). Money is never used when procuring services from other players’ assets.

Leveraging on another player’s Drilling New Oil Field action; converting one of your oil rigs to a pumpjack – pay with 3 shares of your own color

Using another player’s train network when transporting crude oil – one share of your own color per barrel / train used

Using another player’s tanker when shipping crude oil – one share of your own color per barrel / tanker used

Supplying another player’s oil refinery with your crude oil – you gain two shares of the refinery player’s colors for each barrel you supply

Selling refined oil from your refinery to the local market (continent) – you gain 4 shares of your choice for each barrel sold unless it’s your own oil, in which if you sell to the continent, you’ll stand to gain bonus-VP for Area Majority only

You use your own shares as currency to pay for services while receiving shares in other player’s color as payment for your services. In this way, shares liquidity move around the players. The aim – very similar to ACQUIRE – is to acquire enough shares in each color (company) so that you are either the 1st or 2nd majority shareholder to qualify for the end-game bonus VP scoring.

The shares have no other value otherwise ie you cannot sell them to get cash or trade with other shares. They are merely used as a financial instrument in paying for services.

You need loans?

With so many services that are being paid by shares in your own color, you do need to ensure you have a healthy supply of your own shares if your strategy is heavy on making use of other people’s assets. In the event you ran out of shares, there’s always the “loan” to tide you over.

Each loan gets you 10 shares of your own color and you can take out as many loans as you need. There’ s no interest to be paid per round. The cost of borrowing is merely compounded into the final payment and depending on how early you can settle your loan, the compounded interest increases sharply towards late-game.

It’s also more costly to borrow in the later rounds of the game so if your game plan requires funding, suggest you get the loan(s) earlier to max out it’s leverage for you.

At one point in time, Kaz was depleting his red shares so fast he needed a quick dip into the loans to tide him over. When this happens, it meant there were lots of red shares being distributed among the players.

Above: Kaz executing the share-shuffling trick… now you see it, now you don’t.. Viola, I’ve some new red shares!

Where do the Victory Points come from?

It’s all fine and dandy spending money to build oil assets and then paying others in shares when you start moving your crude oil here and there until they are refined and supplied to some local markets. But where’s the VP coming from?

In-game there are only two ways you can gain VP

Firstly it’s from the area card bonus. If you pick an area card (out of the 8) with a VP bonus, you’ll gain that bonus immediately

Secondly, the points can come from building your refinery but you need to build beyond your 3rd refinery to start reaping the Refinery VP. At the cost of $12 per refinery, this can be a costly way to acquire VP but if your strategy revolves around refinery, consider the VP as complementary to your game plan.

The bulk of the VPs would however come from the mid- and end-game scoring

Wildcatter tokens score you 2 VP per token an accumulative VP based on how many tokens you’ve; the first token gets you 2 VP, the 2nd token an additional 4 VP, the 3rd an additional 6 VP and so on

Majority bonus in each share color – for the mid-game scoring, only the 1st and 2nd majority owners get bonus VP but for the end-game scoring the 1st, 2nd and 3rd shareholders (in a 4-player game) would get bonus VP

Majority bonus for the richest player – similar to majority bonus in shares scoring

Lastly there’s the majority bonus for supplying each of the 7 continents (see below) – as with the share/money bonus, the mid-game scoring rewards the 1st & 2nd majority while the end-game scoring rewards the top 3 players

Above: The bonus VP for Area Majority scoring

That’s a wrap on the game overview / quick review. Let’s look at what we think of the game.

Some thoughts on our session

Initial distribution of the oil rigs were mostly in SA, Russia and Asia with NA pretty much dominated by Ivan (Yellow). That’s a good and bad since with single player monopoly of a region, you need to be doing all the grunt work to get the pipeline going. Obviously if you can get that going, you stand to reap all the profits yourselves. 🙂

Delivery to continents were slow in the beginning (above) but quickly gather momentum once the drilling/pipeline were put in place.

Asia & Russia were busy from the get-go but the lack of oil refinery – only the two from start-up – was hampering the flow of oil out of Asia/Russia. There were spaces to add more refinery – not just in Asia & Russia but to the neighbouring Europe and Africa continents – but refinery is not cheap ($12 each) and I suppose no one went for a refinery strategy in our session.

The tankers provided interesting option as you are no longer restricted to sending your crude oil to the nearest/local refinery. You now have the option to send your barrels further to the wider world. If your game centers around majority control of the continent supply, you need good access to transport infrastructure be it trains or tankers in order to be able to move your barrels around to the refinery of your choice.

In the above example, without tankers Green & Red would be forced to keep supplying their oil to South America. However with the help of the tankers, Green & Red can now export their SA oil to the other continents.

I felt we’ve not yet fully understood the strength of the tankers. The choice of which oil refinery we want to sell our crude oil to is partly linked to which color of shares we wish to acquire.. for eg if I’m looking to boost my shareholding in yellow shares, it makes sense for me to send my barrels to a yellow refinery as its owner would then be paying me 2 yellow shares per barrel.

The in-game VPs were pretty evenly spread out during the game. It’s only in the mid- and final bonus scoring that you can see gaps opening up. The in-game VPs are good but not likely be game-winning. It’s more important to time your development to hit the mid-game (after round 5) and end-game bonus scoring.

As the game progresses, SA continued to be a strong producer – the other three blue oil rigs have not even started drilling yet! NA started to get into the action soon after with Yellow (Ivan) still monopolizing the NA supply chain.

Tankers were frequently seen berthed in the NA harbour since with Yellow having massive production and monopolizing the supply chain in NA, the other players thought there’s no point competing with yellow in NA and started to export their barrels to the other markets.

The choice of selling your oil for VP or points if you are supplying via your own refinery (as in the example of Yellow above) presents player with interesting decision. Shares as cashflow is important since you’ll need more shares of your own color to perform most of the production actions but if you chose to claim shares when selling oil thru your own refinery, you “lose out” on the Area Majority fight. I guess it’s the classic decision point on when to switch from income to VP generation.

Blue (Wong YL) started to muscle into the NA market once oil was discovered in abundance there. Yellow’s early dominance under threat. Green & Red were just part players in that market so me & Kaz continued observing with amusement.

Observation: Red shares were down to the last piece! Kaz has really been milking his shares dry…. LOL.

Btw are the share certs limited (think each stack has 100)? What happens when they run out?

The state of the Area Majority for each continent towards end game…. the barrels in each of the continent space (at the bottom of the board) represented the refined oil sold to the continent. Bonus VPs are given to those who have shipped the most, second-most and third-most barrels to each continent.

LOL. Australia’s been running on “fume” for some time now, it seems. No one shipped anything there! 😛

The turn order for the final round is determined manually by each player. After the penultimate round, the number of oil drops (ie VP bonus) from a player’s selected area cards are used to determined who gets to pick their final round turn order first. The player with the most number of oil drops gets to choose his turn order for the last round.

The stack of shares acquired at the end of the game. This element of the game is very similar to ACQUIRE which is also about acquiring shares (in one of the 7 companies) with the intention to be either the 1st or 2nd majority shareholder at the end of the game to enjoy the Majority Shareholder’s Bonus Payout.

In WILDCATTERS, you fight for the same bonus VP format except the method in which shares are acquired is different. In ACQUIRE, you can simply buy the shares you want (there’s the option of trading in a merged company’s shares 2-1 for shares in the new company but that’s not a usual acquisition approach). In WILDCATTERS, you acquire shares of other colors (companies) when they use your assets (eg trains, tanker, refinery) to transport their oil – or when you sell their barrels from your refinery to the local market (you get to pick 4 shares of your choice even yours).

There are three “white” continents which are not depicted on any Area cards ie Europe, Africa and Australia. They denote non-oil producing continents so no oil fields were present in these continents and as such you can’t build oil rig or pumpjacks there. However you can build an oil refinery there (in order to refine oil to sell to the local market) but you would need to ensure there’s suitable transport infrastructure in place to send crude oi barrels your way to be processed.

Tankers are a common source of transport for the oil refineries in the “non-oil” continents of Europe, Africa and Australia – in fact, tankers are the only transportation medium if you wish to ship oil to Australia.

You can see from the continent table on the left in the picture above, there were more oil supplied to Africa (AF) then South America (SA) even though SA is an oil-producing continent and Africa was not.

… while Australia seems to receive no love? L What do those guys used to run their cars then?

North America (NA) – the one in the top corner of the above pic – received the most supply, mostly from it’s own monopoly Yellow but EU (Europe) and Russia (RU) were not doing too badly either.

My thoughts

When we got this on the table, my first thought was comparing this with CRUDE, THE OIL GAME a reimplementation of the classic McMulti. While both works on the same theme – the oil production supply chain – both occupy different segments of the market. CRUDE OIL is a much lighter game while WILDCATTERS would appeal to those who enjoyed BRASS, AUTOMOBILE, INDONESIA, and GREAT ZIMBABWE.

As a game by itself, it certainly ranked itself as one of the solid keepers from last year’s Essen batch. Nowadays Euro games are getting to meh-meh-ish (or as my buddy Hiew likes to call them JASE) but WILDCATTERS offer a thematic gameplay yet delivers a game that’s in the same weight as some of Splotter’s & Martin Wallace’s finest.

I felt there are many layers to the game and you could try out different strategy. Ours was just a first play and I think most of us went for a balanced approach ie we do a bit of everything – drilling la, trains la, tankers also la, refinery also got la, selling oil to every continent trying to be majority everywhere (can meh?), trying to grab all shares etc.

I suppose more plays would reveal to us how viable it is to focus on a specific area or approach (perhaps focus on the upstream) in the similar way that CRUDE THE OIL GAME allows for specialization.

There’s almost no luck in WILDCATTERS except for the choice of area cards (which you could also aruge tests how adaptable is your game plan) and almost everything is open information. Money & shares do remain hidden, but they are trackable info so some has suggested a variant where money is open and shares are kept stacked by colors so that we kinda know who has the taller stack but cannot be exactly sure how many shares in that stack. We’ll likely play with this house rule in OTK.

There’s not that many oil theme board games and with WILDCATTERS, we’ve now added another solid one to our library (together with the classic CRUDE OIL). There are two other notable oil theme games – GIGANTEN from 1999 which is recently implemented as BLACK GOLD by FFG. Perhaps one fine day, we’ll have a Petron-theme nite at OTK. J

WANT A COPY OF WILDCATTERS

We might have a few copies of WILDCATTERS to offer our local customers. These come with the special Essen promo (wooden trains). The Essen promos are limited and would have ran out by now. The base game itself comes with an initial print run of 900 copies. The game retails for EU59.95 (without train sets) and shipping from NL is also expensive (hence the reason we didn’t bring this in for retail sales).

If anyone wishes to get a copy, pls email or PM me and we’ll get back to you if you are the lucky fella. The game should be going for around RM395 (unfortunately no webstore discount or BGC points earned). If you are one of our frequent buyers, I’m happy to give you a 5% discount of this price.

For more pictures of this meetup session, pls see our Facebook photo album (below).

We carry over 800+ games and provide prompt and free delivery to anywhere in West Malaysia. Min order applies for free delivery. If you are a retail store looking to sell boardgames, you are most welcome to get in touch with us.

Find out how you can buy games, earn points and redeem for special promos thru BGC Points.